1. Field of Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to design and implementation of database applications. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to methods and techniques of programmatically managing the creation of database structure, populating the database structure, and accessing and/or manipulating data stored in a database.
2. Description of the Related Art
Development of database applications currently involves two distinct skill sets typically requiring the involvement of both database engineers and software engineers. An example of current database modeling activities may include the following: (1) One or more database engineers capture the requirements of the database application in an entity relationship diagram (ERD); (2) manually or with the assistance of a database tool, such as Oracle9i Designer of Oracle Corporation, the database engineer(s) create an appropriate database schema to support the relationships presented by the ERD; (3) the database engineer(s) convey the requirements of the database application to one or more software engineers; (4) the software engineer(s) capture the requirements in an appropriate form, such as uniform modeling language (UML) diagrams, for development of needed data structures, e.g., class definitions; and (5) the software engineer(s) create the data structures. Other tasks, such as provisioning and providing for access and manipulation of the database typically require similar interactions among the database engineers and the software engineers.
As can be appreciated, a software development team composed of both database engineers and software engineers implementing the above database modeling process is costly both in terms of communication overhead and payroll. Consequently, a need exists to reduce the complexity of and/or automate database design and development tasks thereby allowing application developers with limited or no database skills to efficiently and effectively perform such tasks.